Installing R and RStudio
A Guide for Students
This is a guide to installing R and RStudio locally, on your own machine. Instructions for both Mac and Windows machines are included, as well as plenty of screenshots to make the process easy to follow.
macOS
Installing R
If you already have R installed, skip this section and go straight to installing RStudio. To check whether you have R, open the Terminal and type:
R --versionIf you get a command not found error, that means you don’t have R installed and you can proceed with the steps below. If R is already on your machine, it’s good to make sure you have the latest version installed - if your version is lower than 3.6.1, it might be a good idea to do a fresh reinstall of R.
Let’s download R. Go to https://cloud.r-project.org/ and click on Download R for (Mac) OS X.
Click on the .pkg download of the latest R release (as of November 2019, that is 3.6.1, nicknamed “Action of the Toes” as a reference to this Peanuts comic).
Now let’s start the installation. Double click on the downloaded .pkg file in your browser’s Download pane to start the installer.
If you’ve ever installed anything on your Mac, you should be pretty comfortable with this process.
Click Continue.
Click Continue again…
… and again one more time.
Agree to the terms of service - if you disagree, you cannot install R.
Finally, click Install. The installation is not big (just over 160Mb), but make sure you have sufficient disk space nonetheless.
Make sure to give permission for the installation. Note that you cannot do this unless you have administrator rights on your machine (which you should have if you’re using your own laptop).
Let the installation run its course. This should be pretty quick - less than a minute.
Close the installer.
To check that everything went well, reopen the terminal and type in the same command as before:
R --versionThis time, the command not found error should be replaced by information on the R version you’re running on your machine.
Installing RStudio
Now let’s install RStudio - the most popular IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for the R language. If you already have RStudio installed, you can skip this section.
Go to https://rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/, and scroll down until you see the download options. We will be downloading RStudio Desktop (Open Source License), since it is free - click the big blue Download button.
This takes us to a list of downloads for different platforms - choose the one that says RStudio 1.2.5019 - macOS 10.12+ (64-bit). This will download a .dmg file onto your machine.
Double click on the .dmg file in the downloads pane, or wherever you downloaded it to, to start the installer. Again, if you’ve installed programs on your Mac before, this should be familiar territory. The installer will do its thing.
A window like the one below will appear once everything is done. Click and drag the RStudio.app icon into the Applications folder.
Don’t forget to eject the installer at the very end - right click onto the disk icon that appeared on your Desktop during installation, and select Eject “RStudio-1.2.5019”.
Windows
Installing R
If you already have R installed, skip this section and go straight to installing RStudio. To check whether you have R, click on the Start menu at the bottom left of your desktop, and check whether R appears in the list of all programs. If it does, it means that R is already installed on your computer - clicking on it once will reveal which version it is. It’s good to make sure you have the latest version installed - if your version is lower than 3.6.1, it might be a good idea to do a fresh reinstall of R.
Let’s download R. Go to https://cloud.r-project.org/ and click on Download R for Windows.
Now under Subdirectories, click the base link.
Click the link that says Download R 3.6.1 for Windows to download a .exe file.
Now let’s start the installation. Double click on the downloaded .exe file in your browser’s Download pane, or wherever you saved it to, to open the setup wizard. When asked whether you allow this app to make changes to your device, click Yes. Note that you cannot do this unless you have administrator rights on your machine (which you should have if you’re using your own laptop).
You can use any language you want during installation, but this guide will be using English, so if you want to follow along it’s best that you use English too.
Click Next.
You will be prompted to choose a location for your installation - the setup wizard usually picks a good place by default (usually in your Program Files directory), so you needn’t modify anything here unless you specifically want your R installation in a different place. Click Next.
You will now be prompted for which components you’d like to install - make sure all are selected (unless you specifically desire not to install certain components), and click Next.
Accept defaults for startup options, unless you know what you’re doing. Click Next.
The setup wizard will create a shortcut in your Start Menu. You can leave everything as it is, and click Next.
If you want to create a Desktop shortcut, or a Quick Launch shortcut, make sure to select the appropriate checkboxes. Leave the bottom two checkboxes (under “Registry entries”) selected. Click Next.
The setup wizard will now proceed to install everything appropriately. This should be fairly quick - less than a minute.
Once the installation is complete, click Finish to quit the setup wizard.
R should now be installed on your machine! Just to double check, click on the Start menu at the bottom left of your desktop, and make sure that R appears in the list of all programs.
Installing RStudio
Installing LaTeX
LaTeX is …
We need LaTeX in R because …
While LaTeX installations are platform-dependent, installing it for the sole purpose of use in R Markdown can be done very easily in a platform-independent way from within RStudio.